“In Cassavetes’ work, personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something – a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.”
Category: Art
Cassavetes
“Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.”
Art
“Art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Picasso (maybe)
Work or Labor?
“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”
The End of the Affair
“There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn’t share.”
Ebert on Louise Brooks
“Her job as an actress wasn’t to lead us in the proper reaction. It was to observe its reality.”
Or in Lulu’s own words: “The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”
Divine Egoism
Strange is the faith that takes one’s belief in God as the highest form of sincere and holy flattery. What passion this evokes, what reverie. You see! You see what I have done! How grand of me! What a noble deed! I am truly one of a kind, o Father of mine faith! All delusion, a form of divine egoism: surely God now loves me most of all.
Anti-Oedipus
Foucault’s preface: “Last, but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
“… something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”
Historie(s) du Cinema
“May every eye negotiate for itself.”
“Do not show every aspect of things. Allow yourself a margin of indefiniteness.”
“A film is a girl and a gun.”
The promise of cinema: “The world for a nickel.”
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act with beauty and courage.”
“Perhaps all the terrifying things are something helpless things that need our help.”
“In effect cinema is not part of the communications industry, or the entertainment industry, but of cosmetics, the industry of masks.”
“Cinema has always yearned to be more real than life.”
“Film needs two reels one that gets full or the other gets empty, the master and the slave.”
“To say is to see.”
“A movie projector has to remember the camera.”
“Cinema is only an industry of escapism, because it’s the only place where memory is a slave.”
“The image will come at the time of Resurrection.”
“On the eve of the 20th century, technology decided to reproduce life, so we invented photography and Cinéma. But since morals were still strong, and we would take everything from life, even its identity, we mourned, this killing.”
“Is the man on camera real or already the fiction of a man?”
“If there’s an easy way, the fool chooses the difficult way.”
“And deep inside each love story lurks the story of a nurse.”
“We got rid of perspective, the vanishing point.”
“Art is like fire, it’s born from what is burnt.”
“What is cinema? Nothing. What does it want? Everything. What can it do? Something.”
“Things are there. Why manipulate them?”
“Man has in his own heart places that don’t exist yet and where pain enters so they can be.”
“This is what I like about cinema generally speaking. A saturation of wonderful signs, that swim in the light of their lack of explanation.”
Notes on Sirk
“Perhaps no more monstrous children, outside horror films, were ever seen in Hollywood than those who interfere grotesquely with their parents’ lives in “All That Heaven Allows” and “There’s Always Tomorrow.” Sirk’s lesson has a long throw—politics motivated by a demagogic plea “for the children” is a code for reactionary moralism.” – Richard Brody
Much of American history has been dominated by the overt. reactionary moralism of the middle class. Book banning, anti-pornography, abortion restrictions, etc. – all sold as necessary draconian measures to protect the virtue of children. But the only virtue of childhood is getting to be young. The rest is whistling past the graveyard.
The Hack 