Quote for the Week

My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary - Brassaï

Quote for the Week

'It is legitimate to ask that a film be entertaining, but this doesn't necessarily mean that a film can't have a message. If I write with true conviction about a subject that is important to me, I should at least be able to expect that it is just as important to many others who live here and now and who are struggling with the same problems as I do. Inspiring reflection in others is my gain' - Ingmar Bergman

Quote for the Week

'"You remind me of the poor philosopher in the boat," he said. "The philosopher said to his boatman, 'Do you know philosophy?' 'No.' 'No? Then half your life has been lost.' A little while afterward, a violent storm came up. 'Oh, philosopher,' called the boatman, 'do you know how to swim?' 'No.' 'No? Then your whole life is lost.'

"I hear you talking about art and beauty and autumn leaves," he went on. "Poor philosophers! But in the U.S.S.R. at present there is only one problem: to live…The storm has come up, let's abandon philosophy; let's swim!" page 34, Toda Raba, Nikos Kazantzakis

Quote for the Week

As the bee takes the essence of a flower and flies away without destroying its beauty and perfume, so let the sage wander in this life.

The Dhammapada, Verse 49. 

Quote for the Week

Films need people more than stories.
Landscapes also harbour emotions...
Life's details (for example, "eating") should be respected.

Music can blow like the wind through a scene.

 

- Koreeda Hirokazu, "Things I Learned from Hou" in "Hou Hsiao-hsien", ed. Richard I. Suchenski

Quote for the Week

'It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met' - Kenkō, page 8, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees.

Quote for the Week

'Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then a place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, and imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors', Umberto Eco, p286, The Name of the Rose.

Quote for the Week

'Unlike news, there is nothing inherently valid about a 'rapid response' in film criticism, and the idea that immediacy is somehow a badge of authenticity is baloney which has probably done more to damage the art of reviewing than anything else in an entire century of cinema', Mark Kermode, p140, Hatchet Job. 

Quote for the Week

'Know me!' cried Markheim. 'Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control – if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself' - Robert Louis Stevenson, Markheim

Quote for the Week

I read this a few weeks ago now, and I've not been able to get it out of my head since…

 

'Twice a week, watch a film about which you know nothing' – Mark Cousins, Outside the Bell Jar in Sight & Sound, April 2013.

 

I'm not sure I've quite put it into practice, but I've certainly taken it to heart.

Quote for the Week

'…when we came to do Sunshine, we had this creature Pinbacker – Mark Strong's character – and I remember saying to the guys: "Oh, I know how to do this." And I didn't. When you have that arrogance it's deadly. I always believe you must approach something thinking: "How the fuck are we going to do that?" It should grow as you do it, and your ideas should come as late as possible, and as alarmingly and instinctively as possible' – Danny Boyle, p64, Sight & Sound, April 2013.

(A Paraphrased) Quote for the Week

Earlier this week I went to see Peter Kubelka presenting his Monument Film (more on which soon). During his talk he said something that I thought was worth making my Quote for the Week – but unfortunately I only wrote it down in my notebook in a paraphrased fashion. Still, hopefully I've captured the point he was trying to make…

 

Making and projecting films digitally is the equivalent of hanging prints (rather than paintings) in the National Galley. Film projectionists are like pianists giving a concert.

Quote for the Week

'Just as travellers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace – the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over' p14, Penguin Great Ideas edition of Seneca's On the Shortness of Life

Quote for the Week

'I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can't tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don't know if I am destroying the past or saving it' - Italo Calvino in Memories of a Battle, found in The Road to San Giovanni (the quote is from page 58 of the Penguin Modern Classics edition).

Quote for the Week

'There are a million places to put the camera, but there is really only one' – Ernst Lubitsch

Quote for the Week

'Film form film form film form! can be a hang-up. Wasn't the lens open, letting light in – and all those living people? They made it through and onto film, onto videotape, onto a memory card. (Memory card is a sweet name.)' – Ken Jacobs, in his tribute to Jonas Mekas in Sight & Sound, January 2013.

Quote for the Week

Following on nicely from my last post, this:

 

'"If you know I am an unbeliever," [Pasolini] told a journalist in 1966, "then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief"'

 

Quoted in Divine Reality by Hannah McGill, Sight & Sound, March 2013.

Quote for the Week

'What is being held against you - cultivate it, it is your essence' – Jean Cocteau, as quoted in Nick Pinkerton's review of To the Wonder, Sight & Sound March 2013.

Quote for the Week

'Real art is simple, but simplicity requires the greatest art' – F.W. Murnau, 'The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles', Theatre Magazine, January 2918.

 

Quote for the Week

'It's a combination of wanting a change personally and of feeling like I've hit a wall in my development that I don't know how to break through. The tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me, or at least narrative as we're currently defining it. I'm convinced there's a new grammar out there somewhere. But that could just be my form of theism' – Steven Soderbergh on the reasons for his retirement from film, taken from this excellent interview.